Ranked #5 in Top 100 Leadership Blogs. Executive Book Summaries from a leading Executive Coach. Also, visit www.SteveGladisLeadershipPartners.com.

Search This Blog

Translate

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Innovators's DNA--Post #8--Experimenting

Five Discovery Skills—#5 Experimenting. Finally, innovators are constantly experimenting with new experiences and piloting new ideas. Experimenters unceasingly explore the world intellectually and experientially by holding convictions at bay and by testing hypotheses along the way. Disruptive businesses evolved through a series of experiments into a business model that changed their industry. Such experimenters apply the innovative process to discover about the past (what was) and the present (what is), and experimenting and generating data on “what might be” in the future. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos says, “Experiments are the key to innovation because they rarely turn out as you expect, and you learn so much.” Bezos encourages employees to explore. Surely, he creates a place to both succeed and fail safely. The authors offer three ways to boost creativity: live in a different country, work in a different industry, and learn a new skill. In summary, experimenters love to “deconstruct” products, processes, and ideas to understand how they work. Doing so, they also ask questions about why things work the way they do. This often triggers new ideas for how things might work better.